Industry stalwarts discuss power of trialogue and how context is king at Annual Ad Review

The Advertising Club held (TAC) its ‘Annual Ad Review’ event in Mumbai yesterday. Industry stalwarts gathered to look at the current trends in advertising and how brands are communicating and operating amidst a cacophony of deafening distractions and multitude of new challenges to address consumers.

The session also highlighted how ubiquitous technology and platform agnosticism of the consumer has accentuated the inattentiveness as the consumer is focusing on meaningful and transformative experiences.

Setting the debate in motion, Shubhajit Sen, CMO, Micromax highlighted the fragmented narrative and the fractured time that every brand communication is witnessing today. Terming the contemporary brand communication as a “spectrum of roller coaster emotions”, Sen underlined how the premise of communication has become more cluttered in its present form than ever before.

Speaking on the occasion, Agnello Dias, Chief Creative Officer of Taproot Dentsu underlined the paradoxical times when the brand communication has become more of a trialogue than the dialogue it was supposed to be with the consumers. Elaborating on it, Dias said, “In the current advertising times, brands are not communicating with the consumers alone, they are addressing communication consumers who ultimately influence the actual consumer about the product. So, for an agency now, the task is not just to address the consumers, but also those multiple influencers, who I call mini agencies, that play a crucial role in the consumers’ decision.”

According to Dias, the power and relevance of a trialogue has become an innate component of the current advertising trend, and today the challenge is not just to win over the consumers but the communication consumers too. In his words, the present form of advertising has become a “mass spectator sport.”

In his address at the ‘Annual Ad Review’ session, Josy Paul , Chairman and Chief Creative Officer at BBDO India spoke about how the phrase ‘Content is King’ has finally become ‘Context is King’ and is likely to stay this way for long.

Elaborating on it, Paul said, “People care about context and not ads and consumers react to context as it helps to start and grow the communication. When I try to recall what kind of ads have stayed in my mind in the last one year, I increasingly find that context has played a big role in it. Context helps you to relate to the communication while content is fleeting in nature.”

Adding how context is increasingly finding relevance among the practitioners of advertising and its consumers, Paul added, “It is the context that forces action and it is the context alone that will make heroes out of brands.”